I was surprised and delighted to see Mostra Nuova playing a supporting role in JibJab’s latest “Year In Review” video.

I know I’ve been lax in posting items to Notebook lately. Somehow, between Twitter, Typophile, and making fonts (mostly), I forget it’s here.

Anyway, a really cool thing happened last Wednesday: Lost World’s Fairs. It demonstrates the support of web fonts in the new Internet Explorer 9 for Windows, but it works equally well in most other desktop web browsers (not on mobile phone browsers yet, as far as I can tell). You can read about how it was put together on Jason Santa Maria’s blog.

The big surprise for me was that all three of the demo pages feature fonts designed by me, served via Typekit. Many of my fonts have been available for web use through Typekit for a while, but recently also through Extensis’ WebINK service, Fontspring, and Fontdeck. Note: WebINK and Fontdeck ceased operation in 2015 and 2016 respectively.

Christmas came early for me this year when I received the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly and saw my Mostra Nuova all over the cover. It’s always a big deal as a type designer to see my fonts in use, but this was a special treat. Not only was it the primary font on the cover, they also used it extensively on the big feature section inside.

The feature section starts out with a full page that uses nothing but type. Mostra Nuova is used both large and small, and not just all-caps. The first version I released in 2001 had only caps and I added lowercase in 2009. It’s still mostly used all-caps, so it always makes me happy to see the lowercase get some play.

EW’s designers also made extensive use of Mostra Nuova’s alternate characters, sometimes even in the same block of text. They used the Regular, Semibold, Bold, and Extrabold weights. Adding Semibold and Extrabold earlier this year was a good move. If I hadn’t, I imagine that Mostra Nuova might not have been chosen here. (Thanks to Matt Smith at Louise Fili Ltd. for suggesting I add Semibold.)

The section is comprised of spreads highlighting a particular entertainer (or entertainers) featuring a full-page photo and title page followed by a page of text. Sandwiched between these highlight articles are pages of shorter pieces featuring other individuals, two per page. (I’ve included a detail of the type treatment on the right.)

I thought it was really cool that they even used Mostra Nuova in the folios (page numbers).

The section closes with several pages about entertainers who died in 2020.

All in all, this is one of the most extensive uses of Mostra Nuova I’ve seen in a magazine. Unfortunately, Entertainment Weekly doesn’t print a staff listing, so I don’t know who to credit with the design and art direction. To whomever you are, nice work!

I’d like to thank the Academy for using my font Mostra on last night’s broadcast of the 77th Academy Awards. There were so many other great fonts under consideration to be displayed on the stage floor of this year’s ceremony, and… I’d also like to thank TiVO, Apple Computer, Adobe, FontLab… and all the little people… (music starts to play)… Thank you, everyone!

Back in 1991, I designed a series of packages for the American release of London Weekend Television’s Poirot series on VHS. (My design is above on the left.) As part of the design, I drew the name “POIROT” in a geometric Art Deco style, which I thought was fitting for the series.

The other day, I happened to see the latest incarnation of the series packaging (above on the right) and noticed that the designer had set the title in one of my fonts, Mostra, which I never noticed before is pretty similar to my 1991 lettering design.

I wonder if they knew?

One of the first prominent uses of my recently released Proxima Nova is at Joyent.com where it is part of their corporate identity. Notice they are using the alternate lowercase a.

(Thanks to Stephen Coles for telling me about this.)